When Promised With Ice
by Zarrene Moss
Summary: In another world very similar to the last, Hermione Granger received a poem, and made a different choice. [Alternate Ending to Glass Silence] [Picks up directly after Chapter 22] [The One Where Hermione Follows Narcissa to France]


**A/N:** This is... something I swore I'd never do, then absolutely did. It belongs to a handful of other people way more than it does to me. First and foremost, to hattersarts, for the drawings that inspired it into existence nine months ago; but also to the Cissamione discord, for reminding me why I loved this ship in the first place; and finally, peripherally, to the Bellamione discord, for being the most absurdly motivating internet children in the world. This is an alternate ending which picks up immediately after Chapter 22 of Glass Silence. An apology, of sorts, for apparently breaking some of y'alls Cissamione-loving hearts several years ago.

Curses on this site for not allowing me to direct link you to art, but if you haven't seen, absolutely take the time to take out the spaces and go to hattersarts . tumblr tagged / harry-potter so you can understand why I fell so gay-head-over-gay-heels for Narcissa again that this just had to be written.

* * *

 **When Promised With Ice**

Hermione wiped her eyes, set her jaw, and tossed the book on the bedside table.

She convened a house meeting by banging pots and pans.

Alright, so the banging was really an accident when she didn't slide the pan far enough onto the stove and smashed into it with the pot on its way to the fire, and the convening was really by virtue of carrying oatmeal to Andromeda's room and then using the soft, warm scents of cinnamon and brown sugar to lure her up the stairs, but for Hermione, that was more than ruckus-making enough.

Because then there was Bellatrix, a second bowl of oatmeal, and a wary-eyed circle of witches at various points on the third-floor floorboards.

Hermione squared her jaw. "You both love your sister."

Mouths opened, white teeth glinting with the spark of denial. Then, as the two met each other's mirror-image eyes, Hermione's exhausted stare between them, something miraculous happened.

Bellatrix said, "Dearly."

And Andromeda nodded. "With all my heart."

And it had been almost... easy... from there.

/

Too easy, of course. She knew it had been too easy when she woke to a pair of glowing eyes at the end of her bed past midnight and a flash of sharp-beaked déjà vu. But these weren't the eyes of her owl. A whispered _Lumos!_ revealed the witch crouching there, hunched forward, one fist in the sheets to balance her, eyes searing into Hermione's own.

"You tell her she owes me for this." Her voice was a hiss of escaping steam. "You tell her this is _not_ a permanent arrangement. You tell her—" She moved forward, hand over hand, the sheets over Hermione's knees the face of a cliff to be scaled through will and claws alone. "—she may not have owed me for the rest. She may not owe me for Lucius. But I paid my debt." She was very, very close now, and Hermione was doing her best not to shake or cringe away. "Now it's _her turn."_

One hand fisted in the collar of Hermione's night gown, twisting it slowly but surely higher. "Do we have an understanding, pet?"

Hermione nodded twice.

A nail rose and slid, sharp-edged, over her bottom lip. "Do you need an _incentive_ to remember?"

Two shakes, less steady.

"Once you're all wrapped up in my sister and her pretty new French life in the pretty, _charming_ French countryside shacked up in some pretty old chateau? You had best be very sure not to forget your dear, darling, left-behind Bella, no?" Her voice went sickly sweet, thumb stroking down Hermione cheek.

"I won't," she whispered. "I won't, I promise."

Glinting eyes narrowed and searched Hermione's own. "Good." With two sharp pats to her tingling cheek, barely kinder than a slap, she uncurled from her crouch and slid off the mattress.

"Wait," Hermione called before she could leave the room. "That's... That's it? You aren't going to try to stop me? And you, and Andy, you won't— You will try not to hurt each other, won't you?"

"Don't tempt me," said Bellatrix from the shadow of the doorway, then was gone.

/

Dawn brought a second visitor. Hermione was wide awake when Andromeda cracked the door, slid inside, and crossed to sit beside her. Hermione's back curled her way, face shielded by pillows and blankets. For a moment, she debated keeping her eyes closed, her breathing even, feigning sleep, but when Andromeda's hand reached out and gently tugged her hair off her cheek, tucked it behind her ear, she knew she'd already been found out.

"If you've come to get some kind of promise out of me, you should know your sister beat you to it."

Andromeda's hand stilled. "I'm not allowed to come just to say goodbye?"

Hermione rolled over, staring at her in the half-light from the crack between the curtains.

Andromeda's smile faltered. "No, I suppose not. I only hope…" She shook her head, resettling her fingers low on Hermione's jaw. "…you won't forget what you've left, here. It won't be long before I'm teaching at Hogwarts, and Bella is…"

"Alone," Hermione said quietly. "And stuck on the third floor without you. I know. I do. I won't forget. I—After Lucius, after what the Ministry just gave him? I know she doesn't deserve…" She squeezed her eyes shut, the weight of her own promise to Narcissa, her promise to stay hanging hard and heavy behind her ribs. "I just have to do this. I'm sorry, but there's something I—I have to know." Her lips trembled too much to manage even an apologetic smile. "I might be back before you even notice I'm gone. She might—She might not—"

"She will," Andy said, fingers tracing the line of her jaw one final time. "She'd be a fool not to."

/

So easy had teeth. And threats. And promises. And a very, very sleepless night. And yet, for as upending-of-plans as this would be, it had been very, very easy from there.

They weren't going to kill each other. They weren't going to stop her. The bag was packed by noon. By two, her train was leaving England.

International wizarding trains were an incredible thing, even in double-economy class, where each elbow was forced to exist in an alternate dimension in order not to be duking out simultaneity with the neighbor to either side.

Because international wizarding trains could cross an ocean, and could get her to France in under two hours.

Trouble was, Hermione realized upon exist at Caudeuxbras Station, Hermione had arrived in France. In under two hours. With one suitcase, two month's wages, a lovingly vandalized book of poetry, and a wand. Lacking any comprehension of the French language, any idea where Caudeuxbras Station was in relation to anyplace else in France, which was, after all, an entire country, in which she lacked any idea as to the whereabouts of one Narcissa Black.

Well. She hadn't abandoned her sanctioned post for nothing. The cheery gift stall to her left looked as good a place to start as any.

It gained her a tourist's phrasebook for two knuts. The tourist phrasebook gained her _"Un hôtel?"_ whose room was gained for seventeen galleons per night, and the font desk plus the phrasebook earned her directions four blocks down to the library.

Where Hermione got down to business.

Business was... less than booming. She'd never been in a halfway library like this. She'd heard of them—had heard this about France, that they were more daring when it came to the mixing of their worlds, perfectly willing to leave the Muggles to the microfilm, microfiche, fiction and non-fiction on the first floor while those with magic tromped down to the basement for the moving news archives, spell-books, and scrolls.

She sank her teeth into both. It took several days elbow-deep in recent headlines to find anything like a lead. Narcissa was a non-entity. She'd vanished from England and their scandal had vanished right along with her. A few flush-inducing photographs from the racier French tabloids and five bleary-eyed days later, she was one more crack of her spine in the hard-bottomed chair away from retreating to Black Manor in disgrace when she found it.

If Hermione had been asked in what situation a stiffly smiling photograph of Draco Malfoy would earn a shriek of glee and a definitely disallowed kiss right smack in the middle of his glossy, prematurely receding hairline, she would have denied it ever could have happened. Yet here she was, in the basement, earning glares from two wizards at the next table over for doing just that. It was a _lead._

It was his wedding. The article—if it could even be generously called that—was a scathing dissection of the choice he and Astoria Greengrass had made to be wed in non-traditional Wizarding attire, but Hermione thought he looked perfectly dashing in his tuxedo, or possibly she was just so appallingly relieved to see any Malfoy at all it made her unusually inclined towards sentimentality. She read the article through fifteen times, fixating on a single mention that, yes, his mother had been in attendance. The thought that she'd earned her freedom in time filled her with warmth, but the realization that this had been an _occasion_ , a one-time event in an exotic location which had nothing to do with the family's day-to-day lives had her stomach sinking all over again. She'd earned a mention and nothing more.

Still, it set her back to digging with renewed determination. If Draco was enough of a celebrity that his wedding made headlines, perhaps he had made them before.

The archives from the early days post-war were deep and dark and cluttered, filled with daring raids on lingering Death Eater haunts, rancid debates on the varying moralities of pureblood families and Order members alike, and conspiracy fodder as to whether anyone could truly be certain that, this time, the Dark Lord had met his maker for good. The Malfoys and Blacks cropped up in all sorts of unhelpful ways: their trials, Bellatrix's survival, Narcissa's defiance and change of heart, but it was all speculation and recitation of events from the war itself; nothing that would lead her to Narcissa now.

After three more days closing down the library, she was officially on a first-name basis with all five librarians and the janitor, Jereme. Picking up her feet and her bag from the floor so he could sweep underneath her—and not have to wait until her last-second-before-midnight departure to finish up his cleaning, a task she'd been kept late without overpay one too many times at the Ministry for—she realized the lightness of her coin pouch had little to do with the feather-light charm she'd cast on her belongings and more to do with the dent two weeks of research staying in _un hôtel_ was making in her savings.

Well, she figured with a nervous fingering of knuts and sickles and a very few galleons, she'd just have to dig harder and faster tomorrow.

/

The turn of luck had little to do with faster and harder and everything to do with… well… luck. A nothing sort of photograph, a pap shot of Draco in Mugglish attire. Casual. An outing, a moment of daily life. Hat pulled low over his eyes against the flash as he rounded a street corner beside a train station. She had to watch the photograph repeat several times before she could make out the name on the glass arch over the entrance: _Gare de Rennes._

Straight away, she checked out from _un hôtel_ and bought another train ticket.

She realized she was leaving the bulk of the wizarding world behind when the train transformed midway to Rennes, dropping miscellaneous and mismatched muggle attire in the laps of all its patrons with a loudspeaker announcement of first _"Pantalons de courtoisie!_ " followed by the questionable English translation of "Courtesy chaps!" It took several attempts watching those around her wave their wands and pop into the clothes to get the spell right, but soon she was properly, if ill-fittingly clad for Rennes.

Muggles muddled about left and right the moment she followed the crowd through the platform wall and out into the street. It wasn't a small street, either, nor a small village. It seemed she'd found more of a city, but one whose wizarding component seemed significantly smaller than its Muggle side. While Muggle maps and road signs pointed towards highways and lodgings and places to eat, a smaller set of signs had been disguised for magical eyes only—The top read _For Magical Eyes Only_ —with quaint little wooden arrows pointing off in a variety of directions. _Gare de Rennes_ appeared to be the station at the hub of six little mixed-magic villages, all a good few kilometers off down roads of varying upkeep and type. After two weeks of book-bound solitude and a four-block commute to and from her temporary lodgings, it was all a bit overwhelming. Hermione found herself, once again, alone in a crowd and entirely unsure where to begin.

So she hiked up her bag, stuffed her wand in the waistband of the ill-fitting-but-free train jeans, tugged the courtesy wide-brimmed sunhat down against the bright spring glare on the train-station glass, and set off up the hill, following the arrow with the least-daunting kilometer number beside its name. _Chantepie, 4._

She'd wandered the span of Chantepie by dusk— quaint, like something out of a painting, but uneventful. She asked after Malfoys and Blacks at the only wizarding inn. It felt like a strange crossing of worlds, the little front desk, a girl no older than seven or eight standing atop a stool beside her mother, happily handing over two complimentary sugar pops with the room key.

The names earned no recognition, so she Apparated back to the trainstop in the morning, then set off for the next from there.

She'd seen two by dusk, and her legs ached with it.

She returned to the same inn for the night— cheap, clean, and witch-owned, after all, and this time, let herself sleep in.

It was too far to walk to the third destination. She caught a crowded Muggle bus to Manlansac, then set off to Rochefort-en-Terre on foot. She arrived with the sunset, finding herself in a little cup of mountains, roofs dotting the hillside and gleaming with the last rays of a peachy sun. She walked slowly along a main street overflowing with flowers in brilliant spring bloom, taking in storefronts with fabulous signs bearing names she was beginning to understand, quiet chatter of outside diners whose every-other-word was almost as comprehensible as any passing gossip she might have caught in Diagon. Fragmented, but beginning to sound familiar, even if still foreign. Hermione might learn French quickly, if she stayed.

If she found what she was looking for.

She spotted an inn draped in soft purple wisteria, geraniums in full bloom across the narrow strip of lawn. She hadn't had a real chance to look around yet - might be worth trying a new place for the...

There.

Hair gleaming like rose gold in the dying light. Crossing the street with a glance over her shoulder, then a step off the sidewalk, then a stall as her eyes fell forward again, almost a stumble, because she was crossing towards Hermione, and Hermione knew, with a stilling in her chest like the swell before a storm, she had just been seen.

She had bread in her arms, of all things. A brown paper bag with conspicuous lengths poking out in three different directions, arms and loaves akimbo, drifting forward down the cobblestone street in a slow, dazed sort of way.

And Hermione began to move, too, pushing back the brim of her sunhat, breathing her name far too softly to be heard but knowing, the moment Narcissa's stare locked, her stride picked up, that she'd heard it anyway. With an opening of mind, stirring, staring as Hermione staggered towards her, she picked up speed, settled the bag on the nearest cafe table without setting a foot inside the fence, ignoring the stares from tea-sippers and coffee connoisseurs and waitstaff alike, and then there was no more street between them, and Hermione found herself picked up off her feet, up off the ground, spun with surprising strength, held close, squeezed tight, exclamations of quiet disbelief breathed into her curls and lost into kisses and...

"Oh, _mindre_ , you shouldn't be here."

"I know," she answered, half a whisper, half a laugh.

"Hermione—" She kept hold of her, ran her hands down from her shoulders to her wrists and back again, still pressed together, knee to knee, thigh to thigh. _"How?"_

"Would you believe me if I said the library?"

It was Narcissa's turn for a breathless laugh, a cupping of her cheeks. "Yes, yes I would."

When Hermione reached back to stop her hat from sliding off the back of her head, Narcissa caught her hand, caught the hat with the other, and tugged it free, hung it from the wrought iron fence post beside them instead. The world was brighter out of its shadow, still the warm side of sunset, the warmth in Narcissa's cheekbones, the warmth in that impossible, beautiful smile she'd seen for only a day and a night and a morning of her life and had almost resigned herself to never seeing again.

"I had to," she whispered. "I'm sorry, I couldn't let it be, Narcissa, I—"

The hand in hers squeezed.

"I broke a promise, I know, I know I shouldn't have and I am so, so sorry, but…"

She wasn't expecting the kiss. Narcissa's lips fell to hers in a careless instant, stealing her apologies, filling her with warmth to rival the spring. She stretched into it, up on tip-toes, growing towards the sun. She felt it unwinding inside of her, opening her to everything inside Narcissa's smile she hadn't given her the time to say, a complete welcoming of her presence, here, in Narcissa's arms, Narcissa's thoughts, Narcissa's new world.

"You should be," she breathed when they parted, Hermione weak-kneed and a little limp in her grasp. "Oh, _I_ should be." She kissed Hermione's cheeks, first left, then right, then back again, before finally kissing her forehead, lingering with a warm press of lips clinging to skin. "But I'm not." Her breath shivered over Hermione's scalp. "I'm not sorry at all."

Hermione pressed her face against Narcissa's chest, arms wrapped around her waist, Narcissa's arms equally tight around her. They stood together on the sidewalk for enough silent moments that Hermione heard the café patrons behind them finally stop giving their little spectacle the bulk of their attention and resume their own conversations and dinners, quiet chatter picking up and swelling into the air. None of it came through as words. None of it mattered. She could still feel Narcissa's kisses tingling every bit of skin she'd touched.

"Oh, what am I doing," she said at last, setting Hermione at arm's length. "You've come so far! Come, sit. Tell me everything."

Scooping up Hermione's hat and her bag of groceries, she steered them through the white-painted gate and up the two steps onto the café terrace. She ignored the amused look from the server as he escorted them to a table, the stares cast their way, never taking her eyes from Hermione, that ghostly, spring-night smile never leaving her lips.

Hermione could only stand to take her in a piece at a time. Pearl earrings caught the light. A pale, lace-trimmed undershirt lent decorum to the low v of her white cross-necked blouse; structured shoulders giving way to loose sleeves cinched just above her elbows like a perfect afterthought; all tucked into the slim waist of tailored black slacks. Lips painted crimson—lightly smudged. Color ran high in Hermione's cheeks. Narcissa could have passed for Muggle, yet Hermione could feel, could _taste_ the magic wrapped around her with every breath she took. She looked so right here, perfectly poised in this perfect, sunset-drenched world. Impossible, it was impossible that she'd found her, impossible that they sat here, now. Impossible, even as she clasped their hands together on the table while Hermione struggled to piece together words she hadn't thought how to say past the absolute drive to _find her_ , yet the impossible feeling of Narcissa's fingers wrapped tight around her own kept her from feeling the chill of the setting sun at all.

"I knew," she managed to start past the lump in her throat. "I always knew this was… the end. That I was doing… everything you needed to let you go, and I—I wanted that, I wanted this for you. But then you left me that note, that poem and I— I couldn't. Oh, Merlin, I'm going to sound like such a fool, but I couldn't _bear it_." She let out a shaky laugh. " _Should have_ s and _would have_ s and _in a day or two_ s and only getting to say goodbye to you in a dream? I just—"

Narcissa's eyes widened. One hand lifted reflexively towards her own lips, then drifted down again, settling more softly against Hermione's knuckles, a look of strange wonder all across her face. "Hermione, I—"

"Wait, please. Let me finish? I know, coming here… It may have been a huge mistake, and I— I'll understand, if you send me back, if you need this time to be about your family, if I wasn't anything more to you than— than the first thing you'd felt in a long, long time." Her voice cracked.

Narcissa's fingers squeezed tighter, but Hermione couldn't bring herself to meet her eyes just then. She watched the breeze picking up in the streetlights instead, plucking the least-tethered petals free from the wisteria and geraniums and roses, a wash of fairy-wing color in the gathering dark.

"But they promised me—your sisters promised me they'd keep the peace because, well. Because they love you. And I believed them. I do. I know how much you mean to them, the both of them…" Because how could they not? Because how could _anyone_ not? "…and also because," she added, forcing lightness into her strangled voice, "there was a little bit of friendly blackmail, too. I'm, erm… I suppose I'm on loan. Until we can find some other way to help them." She swallowed. "Out of the mess I just left them with."

"Hermione." Narcissa's voice was so soft it almost broke her. Her fingertips strayed, thumb tracing circles over Hermione's wrist bone and the pulse beside it.

" _Bonsoir madame. Puis-je prendre votre commande?"_

The appearance of a white-shirted waiter at her elbow made Hermione jump and retract her hands. She strangled down a laugh at the strange realization that, after so many days and weeks out in public with the woman across from her, months of fake-dates and easy pseudo-intimacy, now that they had actually shared… something… together, she was as jumpy as she had been when she first arrived at the Manor, when Narcissa had greeted her with indifference and scorn.

Now, she couldn't even piece together the presence of mind to have read the menu.

Narcissa, however, ordered them herbal tea in effortless French, her low, smooth voice shivering over Hermione's skin as silkily as her touch. " _Avez-vous une tisane?"_

" _Oui madame."_

" _Un pot à partager, s'il vous plaît."_ She slid her hand close across the tablecloth to draw Hermione's attention. "If you're hungry—"

Hermione shook her head. She hadn't eaten, but she wasn't. Her stomach was overstuffed with butterflies. Narcissa's eyes were still as pale as ice, as pale and deep as she'd remembered, but so, so unusually warm, here…

She blinked three times in rapid succession, shaking herself free of their spell.

"So," Narcissa said the moment the waiter left them alone, voice wry. "My sisters skipped sending letters and sent you instead."

Hermione bit her lips. "Something like that," she admitted. "But… it wasn't really like that at all."

"Oh, no, I think it was very clever of them."

The tea arrived, two cups and a pot to share. Narcissa poured.

"Now—" she continued as though the waiter had never stepped in, "—if I want to keep you, I'll have to appease them somehow."

There were competing edges in those words, one that drew pink higher on Hermione's cheekbones, one that sent a less forgiving chill down her spine. She picked up her cup for easier warmth.

"No peace ever lasts among us long. But enough of them, for now." Hermione could still feel those eyes on her as she blew over the surface of her tea. "You've told me how you found me. You've told me why you almost didn't try. But you have yet to tell me why you _did_."

She stilled. "I—" Her hands began to shake. Narcissa reached out, guided her to resettle the cup in its saucer before it could spill. Hands reclaimed, she didn't let go, cocooning Hermione's fingertips between the warm porcelain and warm skin. "I remembered… something…" she whispered. "Or… didn't? Not really. I—I don't know how to explain but I just kept… I kept _hearing it_ , like I was saying it to myself, but it was _your_ voice, in my own head, like something you'd said to me in a dream."

Narcissa got that strange, startled look on her face again. "If I'd known about your dreams…" she breathed, then shook her head. "No matter, now."

Hermione paused, waiting for further words. When none were offered, she finished as quietly as she'd begun. "You said something like, _'Your trust is a gift.'_ "

"An incredible gift," Narcissa corrected, gentle, yet firm.

It shivered into place inside Hermione _just right_ , so perfectly the way she'd heard it echoing in her thoughts since the night Narcissa left that she gasped aloud. "Yes— Just like that. Exactly that. And I—I listened. And I had to trust that… feeling this, wanting this… was right. That finding you was the right thing to do."

She freed herself from Narcissa's hold and picked up her tea at last, now easily cool enough to drink, and to stare into intently, full concentration on pale brown water and scattered swirling leaves, anything to not watch for a reaction to her words.

She still saw Narcissa's hand reach for her own tea. Long, delicate fingers pale and the slightest bit shaky against the pale, delicate cup. "That wasn't my intent," she said softly, unreadably.

Hermione forced down two sips. "So I shouldn't have come," she admitted again, voice strained but not breaking. "And I'm sorry, but I did. And now… I'm here."

At last, she looked.

"You're here," Narcissa breathed, then smiled, weak and tender and bittersweet, and Hermione's heart leapt. "I can hardly believe it, but you're here. I don't know _what_ I did to deserve it but… here you are." She let out a fragile, disbelieving laugh. "Well." She set down her tea. "Let me show you, then. Where you are. Come back with me. It's just a little ways into the country. My grandmother's home."

"Your grandmother?" Hermione grabbed hold of the lifeline away from confessions and too-earnest words with both hands.

Narcissa's smile warmed. "Yes. You've come to a rare place from my childhood."

As Hermione quickly finished her tea, something occurred to her. "You don't mean…" Her voice went higher. "Your childhood. Then, you and your sisters… They must have known about… Rochefort-en-Terre, this town, this place is…"

"They could have told you where I was, yes."

Hermione coughed through an embarrassed laugh. "Merlin's beard, I didn't think to ask!"

/

"Are you cold?" asked Narcissa as they stepped from the shelter of the terrace into the street.

"No. It's nice out here."

Narcissa took her arm. Her fingers trailed over the back of her wrist, easily finding goosebumps. "You're shivering."

Even as Hermione shook her head, she let herself be drawn closer to Narcissa's side. "It's not the cold," she confessed.

Narcissa's step hitched. Her fingers glided down again, slipping over the back of Hermione's hand, squeezing once. "Then you won't mind the walk?"

Even if it had been the full dark of January, Hermione would not have minded the walk. Quiet and breezy and everything smelling like rose petals and dark enough to see both the sun's last rays and the moon in the sky together. Impossible, impossible dream of an evening.

"How is this place real?" she asked instead.

Narcissa guided them out from under the village streetlights. "The flowers are a tradition here. My grandmother would tell us it was fairyland when we visited. I believed her for an embarrassing number of years."

"I would have, too," Hermione admitted, tempted to try and catch a passing petal.

"You can blame the Americans, again." Narcissa's tiny hum of a laugh shivered over Hermione's skin. The words made her think of poetry—a quiet, happy history of Millay and a witch school in the States. "Determined to keep me humble. It was an American artist who demanded the whole town plant geraniums for his inspiration, and since he'd bought nearly all the land they lived on, they did. That was a century ago. It's been blooming with artists and flowers ever since."

"And witches?"

"And witches. We always have had a fondness for places where you can all but feel the magic in the air; places where certain strangeness can go unnoticed."

Hermione had never thought of it quite like that before. "And you… you didn't grow up here." She knew that much. She'd seen that much in memories that weren't her own. Black Manor had raised the sisters from the start.

"No. We visited in the summers. Some of my favorite memories."

They had reached a gate, a black, curling, wrought iron thing nestled into a heavy stone arch, the lot of it draped in eerily familiar ivy. Through the twisting, bending bars, she could see a hill leading up between shadowy slumps of flowers towards the last slivers of the sun.

"And… your grandmother?" Hermione asked, fighting a sudden chill.

"Long since passed." She pushed wide the gate. "This place has been mine for several decades." When Hermione lingered on the street, she held out a hand. "Coming?"

Taking a shaky breath, she allowed herself to be drawn close and onto the grounds of another Black family home.

Walking under the arch and into the wild, sloping hillside, déjà vu faded with the sunset, eclipsed by the quiet ease of this place—not too big, not too small, and not at all menacing after dark; scattered with never-rounded stone and steep, clay-tiled roofs like a cottage; built into the hillside like a castle; built sturdy, like a home. Above them, the stars crept out, their light caught and reflected in its latticed windows. Simply, impossibly, lovely.

For what may well have been the first time in her life, with Narcissa's hand around her waist, the scent of honeysuckle and roses on the breeze...

Hermione felt entirely at peace.

" _There you are,"_ Narcissa whispered, and as Hermione blinked up at her, she realized—No. Not whispered at all. Her lips hadn't moved.

"Oh!" she gasped. "You—"

She cupped Hermione's cheek. "I was wondering when you would stop feeling scared, apprehensive, closed to me."

"I—I didn't realize—"

As Hermione stammered, her hand fell away. "If it makes you uncomfortable, I will stop. I'll never do it again."

"No," Hermione whispered, struck by the worry, the trace of pain in Narcissa's voice. She remembered, all at once, that her talents had alienated others, in the past. They had worried her too, once, but only because she wasn't ready for Narcissa to know… "I'd just… I'd forgotten what it felt like when you— And, without any spell, you can still—"

 _When we've shared what we have, it is much harder not to._

Oh, that voice felt so, so right there. She'd never though it, never wondered in their too-brief time together, what it might be like… beyond. Beyond that night. What any of this might be beyond a night.

"I don't mind," she said. "I want to know…" Everything. Everything about this. Everything this could be. I want to forget everything else, and know _this_.

And Narcissa's smile edged with a colder curl of darkness, and Hermione felt it over every inch of her skin. "Inside, then," she murmured.

And in they went.

/

It was a shivery, distractible tour. She learned that a home which had been Narcissa's for decades was far warmer, cozier, and simpler than Black Manor. She learned the first floor, the open feeling of a modern witch's kitchen, a clean and uncluttered living room just alongside it with a wand-lit fireplace to welcome them in and dining space on the back terrace, white wicker and starlit stone backed by the other side of the same glass-cased fire. She learned three branching hallways on the second floor: several empty bedrooms and unopened bathrooms along one corridor, the second hall empty of even doors save a distant smudge of green at its farthest end—Narcissa ushered her past without explanation—and the last hall home to a close, bronze-toned study and a warm, firelit bedroom just beside. She learned that the sight of Narcissa's sharp-handled wand emerging to light the fire made her breath catch. She learned that two weeks had not been long enough for her skin to forget Narcissa's touch. She learned that two weeks had been far, far too long, to go without Narcissa's touch.

And she learned, with the glide of fingers along the nape of her neck between footsteps, the warmth of a palm slipping beneath the hem of her shirt to warm the base of her spine on the stairs, and with the press of Narcissa's lips against her own with all of her happily, dizzily pressed back against the doorjamb, the threshold of her bedroom, that maybe, no, _yes_ , definitely—it had been too long for Narcissa, too.

But when Hermione's hands reached for the tuck of fabric at her waist, tempted towards the contact they'd had skin-to-skin for a few stolen hours, then never again, Narcissa said, "Wait," against her lips. "I've one more place to show you."

She led her on less steady feet down the "empty" hallway on the second floor and behind the small green door at the end. Close wooden stairs led upwards, doubling back like a fire escape at the outer wall. It was a little drafty in the stairwell, like the wood-panel walls were the only layer between them and the darkened yard, the door in the hallway trusted to keep out the chill with its summer-green breadth alone.

After forty-two stairs—Hermione counted each in silence—they met another door; small, with a six-inch lip at the bottom. Narcissa hunched to step through, a motion impossible to do in a dignified way, but done without hesitation, and when done by her, it managed to look... adventurous. A too-large Alice shrinking through the keyhole. For an instant, Hermione could picture her climbing trees. Young. Dark-haired. Fearless.

"Coming?" Her hand crossed back through, long, pale fingers extended in open invitation.

Hermione took hold and crossed into Wonderland.

The ceiling converged to a flat-topped point far above them. Despite the tiled roof she'd seen from the outside, these appeared to be pure glass from within, crystal-clear and latticed with terra cotta beams like a riviera greenhouse. Through the eaves, the spreading stars glinted behind a scrim of clouds. Below, inside this impossible attic: shelves of books. Neat, contained, but many. And, tucked between them, just ahead—two chairs, plushly green.

"Oh," Hermione sighed. _Home_.

Narcissa lingered by the door. "Welcome to another of our little hoards of knowledge." She ran a hand across her hair, the top half pulled back loosely, several disheveled strands freed and joining the bottom after their earlier kisses. "I'm not thrilled with everything in it. She was... from a different time."

"Dark magic?"

"No, no. A time before Black family women had grown our teeth. It's... a lot of knitting patterns, recipes."

Hermione's eyes widened. "It wasn't always done by house-elves?"

"Oh, no, it certainly was. Just had to be sure the lady of the house was read up on it to discuss at dinner parties."

Hermione skimmed her fingertips along the nearest spines, covers old but unfaded, edges diamond-patterned and cheerily innocent. "If this was still elves… What did your grandmother actually do with her time, then?"

Narcissa smiled. "Actually," she echoed, "I think she was quite content. She designed and renovated this house and its rooms a hundred times over until she'd gotten it just right, all under the guise of keeping a happy home."

Hermione looked around again, realizing as she took in the vast dark and distant light of the sky, the warm closeness of the shelves, that she could feel it. Care. Happiness. Much the way Black Manor had never felt anything but foreign, unwelcoming, and cold. "That's... a little bit inspirational."

"It is." Narcissa's voice was fond, if distant. Hermione sensed memories close to the surface. Curiosity rose.

"How did your family go about getting their new role in life, then?"

Narcissa hummed. "Becoming Death Eaters, you mean? My mother, I suppose, deserves all credit for that. Her marked interest in punishment became an interest in politics. She raised us sharp, against my father's will, if cruelly."

"If?"

Narcissa stilled. "Perhaps you're right. Neither was a kindness."

"If your grandmother was like this… How'd she get to be... how she was? Your mother, I mean."

"Something in the water in England," Narcissa offered dryly. "I never knew."

She put a knee up on the chair to the right, elbow on its back, chin on her hand, studying Hermione as she lingered by the shelves. It distracted her completely, seeing Narcissa like this, effortlessly, carelessly relaxed and dropping tidbits of her past in a way Hermione had never seen before.

"You look right at home, here."

I feel it, Hermione thought, but didn't say. They had gotten through the hows and whys and apologies of her being here, now, then fallen back towards the past—intentionally avoiding the future. "So do you," she answered instead.

Narcissa smiled. "Join me?" She patted the armrest of the second chair.

Letting the book whose spine she'd tipped with her first finger settle back to the shelf, she crossed to the chair and sat on its edge. Narcissa said nothing, just watched her with those pale, inscrutable eyes until Hermione began to squirm in the silence.

"I never would have dared to wish for it," she said at last. "You. Here." She stretched out a hand, fingered one straying strand of Hermione's hair. "But I dreamed, anyway, and now..." A quiet hum. "I won't be able to let you go." Her fingertip twirled idly, tugging Hermione the slightest bit closer.

She felt like she might slip from the seat at any moment, fall straight through the floorboards and wake in her Caudeuxbras hotel bed, roll over off the mattress and fall even further, straight through the streets of France and into the Channel and back to the Manor, perhaps even the Inn before that. Yet here she was. "Does that mean I can stay?" she asked breathlessly.

"Can you!" Narcissa laughed. "Oh, _mindre_. You _must_." Her eyes sparkled, close and all at once utterly transparent with joy. "Tonight, you'll sleep beside me. Tomorrow, you'll wake before the sun and creep up here to have your fill of the new old books. I'll find you reading several hours later, steal you away into town. I'll show you the biscuit maker, treat you to _pain d'épices_ over the River Arz, and come Saturday we'll visit Draco in Rennes. Hermione, I have imagined you here a thousand times. Of _course_ you'll stay."

The words were dizzying; she had to grip the armrest to steady herself against them, breath catching, each one echoing somewhere deep inside her, and deeply right. Narcissa's hand covered hers—earnest, entreating.

"And someday, my sisters will come knocking with disaster, and maybe, _maybe then_ , I'll be ready to give this up for a day, a week—however long it takes the four of us to mend things. But until then?" She traced her other thumb over Hermione's lip, coming away with a smudge of red—the happily damning evidence of her last, eager kisses. "We will have every minute of this, you and I."

And Hermione had no idea what to say, every word shooting through her in a bolt of the day's impossible, impossible joy, but when Narcissa leaned in, kissed her lips crimson all over again, she realized she was beaming, smiling so broadly she was seconds from tears, lips stretched and trembling with every brush of Narcissa's against them; she realized she was laughing into it, laughing against a wicked, impossible, beautiful smile as real as her own; and everything she needed to say, Narcissa could taste there, in her smile, in her laughter, could feel in the place where thoughts and wants and longings brushed with nothing but the waking of springtime, and not a single trace of ice.

"We will?" she gasped against her.

Narcissa's hand slid into her hair, no longer at all in her own seat, knees to either side of Hermione's, trousers creased against the cushion, other hand braced against her thigh with the handle of her wand between them, sharp and heavy with promise.

 _We will_.


End file.
